For once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature – only the 17th woman out 119 laureates in the award’s history.
The Swedish Academy is famous for its secrecy and its often apparently obscure choices. The October announcement frequently has journalists and editors frantically Googling that year’s recipient – and perhaps a decade ago, Annie Ernaux might have received the same treatment. But, while her work has been well known and well received in France since the 1970s, and published in English translation from 1991, it is only since around 2019, when The Years, her monumental work of fiction-memoir was shortlisted for the International Booker prize, that Ernaux has made a big impact on the anglophone world.
